Chennaiyil oru mazhai kaalam!

Chennaiyil oru mazhai kaalam!
First: Credits for title go to Sandhya, as she told me about this movie which should have been made.

Now, IT’S RAINING IN CHENNAI!!

Every road is marshy, everything is dirty, and all leaves in a bright, nice green, unique only to plants drenched in rain.

Walking down the rain after going out with a friend with a silly black umbrella said to protect me, I was thinking of various things. Black umbrellas are sad, but worse are those colourful umbrellas printed with flowers. I’d deny any opportunity to take them because they remind me of movies – of women clad in saris getting down from a bus in a village. Ha! You might have guessed it right; they are new teachers for the village school. And hence follow horrible village stories, which I shall not discuss.

Rainy days were obviously fun during schools, to be exact, rainy mornings. A morning when it has been raining gives me high hopes – of school being declared a holiday. Immediately what would follow would be a flurry of phone calls from grandparents and schoolmates, all discussing the probability of a holiday. And soon, discussions by parents as to whether I actually deserved a holiday from school. Things would go on like this till about 8 A.M., and by this time, I would be completely dressed up and ready for school….bag pack panni, lunch vecchu, ellam nadanthudum. I would sigh innumerable number of times, and pray fervently that it’s a holiday.
But given the “strict” school that I was in, all hopes of holidays would be lashed. I would sigh more and curse my school. Then would begin the trauma of how to get to school. My dad would not be all that willing to drop me, and I would, obviously hate to take a bus. Auto drivers would shudder at the thought of wading through the waters of G.N.Chetty Road, and immediately turn down our pleas.

Finally reached school after great difficulty, or rather, hullabaloo. School…ugh, outside there would be a huge marsh that has to be crossed with great caution. Irukardhu poradhunnu, a huge traffic jam enough to drive anyone nuts.

Whew, finally reached the classroom, to discover that though it’s about half an hour since the school started for the day, less than a quarter of the class had turned up. That means more joy! We would again start prayers – now that the rain should pour like crazy and hence others should not come to school. All this in the hope that with just nine or ten students, teachers won’t teach.

Hmm…we weren’t given even that little joy. All of them would ultimately turn up, one by one, and by 9:30, almost the whole class would be there, a rarity on normal days.
Sigh! Things would get worse when returning by public bus. Very few would have umbrellas and there was this huge dilemma if many should huddle under one and all get wet or let one be clean and dry and the others drenched. Ultimately we would get a bus and get inside. It’s pretty surprising how God makes buses so furiously crowded on rainy days; and with our clean, white canvas shoes, this was a pain. We would start next round of prayers that people shouldn’t stamp our shoes, and curse anyone who did, under our breaths.

Nowadays rainy days mean nothing to me; if it’s raining too hard in the morning, I simply skip my lectures…attend practicals after a round of grumbling.

Good old days!! But even now, it’s fun!